


The Ship/Shape/Span of the World, by a Spick: Being the Eleventh Tale of the Coin, the Sword and the Medallion

by LooNEY_DAC



Series: The Sword [3]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-16
Updated: 2017-03-16
Packaged: 2018-10-05 22:01:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 10,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10317914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LooNEY_DAC/pseuds/LooNEY_DAC





	1. I: Mission Briefing

…Which, again, proved neither complete nor entirely correct. The Realm’s ‘intelligence network’ really, really, really needed remedial instruction. That, or Melegrethan was just being deliberately enigmatic again.

At any rate, this time I knew that I would be gone for quite some time, that it would be mostly a sea voyage (no, I won’t be needing any Dramamine, thank you), and that part of my job would be to escort two preteens from this world around for a bit (OK, they might need some).

So, apparently I wasn’t the only one from our world to travel back and forth to that of the Realm. Questions filled my head immediately, but I knew I would get no answers—no satisfying answers, at least—out of Melegrethan, so I kept silent. There would come a time when I could ask the questions that burned in my mind, if I was only patient enough to await it.

I had been in the camp for almost six months at that point, and—No, wait. Let me re-emphasize that last bit. I had been in the camp for almost exactly six long, interminable, endless months when this happened, so my patience had already been strained nearly to the breaking point.

Mr Price was still lurking in the background in a way vaguely portentous of menace to come; my birthday had come and gone, mostly unmarked, as had the anniversary of my family’s extinction; I had suffered through a long and dizzying course on the thousand-plus-year lifespan of the Eastern Roman Empire and was still trying to match which faction was trying to kill whom when and why; and I was still mostly isolating myself from my fellows at camp, though not in a I’m-too-good-for-these-people kind of way, or so I hoped.

So much for me. Now, to my erstwhile companions on this escapade.

All the campers went by noms de guerre, so as to avoid being recognized from the hyper-sensationalized newspaper reports Mr Hearst and his ilk had so popularized; your reputation at camp was not to be based on why you were at the camp, but how you comported yourself at the camp. Thus, I was Jay J Sefton to my fellows, a name nothing like my true name, which I still despise. Sefton was a little better fit for me.

At any rate, I was to escort one of the younger boys from my camp, and a girl of similar age to him from that near-mythical sister camp to ours. The boy went by “Joey” and the girl was called “Cookie”, and they gave no hint of having known each other before, though if you went by appearances, they might have been siblings.

Height-wise, I’d finally made it up to five-foot-four [Ed.: about 163 cm], while Joey and Cookie (henceforth “the kids”) were still both straining to break the forty inch mark [Ed.: around 102 cm]. Neither of them spoke terribly often; I gathered this had something to do with why they were in the camps, so I put off prying about that as well for the fabled “better moment” of lore.

The kids were both white, but in a tanned and freckled and dark-and-curly mop kind of way rather than the old ‘Blond Gods of the North’ kind of way. Again, they looked enough alike that you could think they were related without actually sharing any features.

“So… Why are they coming along again?” I actually hadn’t meant to ask that; certainly I didn’t mean to ask it within earshot of my two companions. Oops.

Melegrethan wasn’t put out in the least by my puzzled question. “They have their mission to complete, even as you have yours. It will be rather obvious should they succeed or fail.”

Melegrethan, in case you hadn’t noticed, is a master at telling me something fairly obvious and absolutely nothing else. At any rate, he then indicated that he was going to make with the sending, so the three of us donned the old Mae West life jackets we’d been given and each of the kids took one of my hands pretty firmly. I think they may have been afraid of Melegrethan, or at least more afraid of him than they were of me.

Between one blink and the next, we were in the Chamber of the Tree, that grandest and most solemn part of the Realm, and its gateway to even more far-flung places, as I’d discovered earlier. This was certainly the fastest and easiest transit to the Realm I’d had thus far.

I already described the Tree in an earlier tale, so I’ll just re-copy here what I put there:

“…The tree was as twisted as it was huge, if not more so. It towered over our little group, the branches reaching out so far that their extreme ends were held up by other trees, forming the huge doughnut-shaped chamber we were in. Gargantuan golden apples (seriously, they were the size of basketballs) hung above our heads, not moving in the least…”

Only now, one solitary apple hung from a slender branch that popped out from the gnarled and burled trunk of the Tree at about the level of my head. This apple, unlike the others so high overhead, was a deep and inviting red, and was normally sized, again unlike the huge fruits in the canopy.

At the base of the Tree and almost directly below the lone apple that dangled so invitingly was a familiar golden plaque. When last I’d seen it, the plaque had been blank, but now upon its shimmering surface was written this:

Pick the apple, if you dare  
Then you go, you know not where  
Plant the apple in the square  
Ever well your town shall fare

This was actually rather clear and direct, compared to the stuff I’d been getting from Melegrethan as mission prep. In brief: one of us was supposed to pick the apple, and doing that would send the three of us to our next and presumably final destination, probably a town where we were to plant the apple as some kind of ward against evil. This didn’t explain the Mae Wests, though, but that could probably wait.

The only problem was that each of the three of us thought that one of the other two was meant to pick the apple, so none of us wanted to reach for it—at least, at first. Eventually, I persuaded Cookie to reach for it, but the branch seemed to pull away slightly as she did, so we knew she was not the one. Next went Joey, with similar results, which surprised me, as I’m usually the onlooker and guard rather than the prime mover.

At least, I hadn’t been the prime mover the first time I’d come to this Chamber, but I had also been much younger then. Perhaps that was part of the shifting of my burden as Young Protector as I grew older and hopefully wiser.

Be that as it may, I was obviously supposed to pick the apple, which almost fell into my outstretched hand, reminding me again how the signs in these parts tended to the obvious and unambiguous rather than the subtle and easily misinterpreted. I had seen such before; undoubtedly, I would see such again.

I had the apple in hand, but something told me to give it to Joey, who solemnly put it into an inside pocket of his coat, below the life vest he still wore. The world immediately began to wobble, and the three of us had just enough time to join hands before we were flung from the Chamber into a somewhat familiar misty grayness…

TO BE CONTINUED


	2. II: Storm and Board

Lightning stabbed across the skies, briefly providing flashes of light in the tempestuous gloom, but its usual thunderous accompaniment was lost in the mad howling of the storm that raged across the ocean.

The frenzied wind whipped furiously at the sea, its pounding rage spent in the least on the purely notional resistance the salty fluid offered against it. A sailing ship caught in this gale would soon be stripped of the balance of its rigging, furled sails or no. The vessel that actually was trying to ride out this tempest was thus doubly fortunate in not being a sailing ship, but a steamship instead.

The ship was quite oddly shaped: nearly a perfect square from above, but more like a stepped pyramid from the sides, it bobbed over the wild waves in a dizzying manner. Some combination of its odd shape and quite a bit of luck kept it the right way up and un-sunk though the wind and sea raged all around.

The kids and I hardly noticed any of this, however, as we were busily engaged in trying not to drown, no mean feat in this hurricane, even with our Mae Wests. Had we only had our clasped hands to keep us together, we would have been sheared apart almost immediately, but Melegrethan had given me a small but sturdy coil of rope, and I swiftly put it to use. Lashed together in a drenched and shivering bundle of humanity, the three of us were almost beneath the ship before we saw it.

The fact that Cookie screamed bloody murder when she saw the ship was almost certainly what saved us; it was also a quite natural reaction, as Joey and I screamed similarly. Cookie’s screams, however, were of such a particularly piercing pitch that they penetrated the noise from the storm to catch the ears of one of the crewmen, who rushed to investigate its source.

Getting us aboard in the middle of the storm was no easy task, either, but they managed it. I mean, when we all woke up, we were in a good-sized cabin, dressed in dry nightshirts and lying on a bed both warm and soft, so they must have hauled us aboard somehow.

The sun was streaming in through some really nice skylights, and the ship was rocking normally; obviously, the storm had ended and it was time for us to be up and about the business of thanking our rescuers. After a few false starts, I managed to choke down some water and get some Dramamine into the kids, but they were still pretty wiped from their dousing of the last night.

A most peremptory knock sounded on the door. After another quick check of the kids, I called out, “Come in,” and in walked the last person I’d expected to see: Meredith “Merry” Maxime. A nice shiny pair of rings sparkled from the appropriate finger, and she was, as they say, great with child.

“How on earth are you not totally laid up in bed?” I asked in some incredulity. My late lamented aunts had always complained of the Worst Motion Sickness Ever when they were pregnant. Of course, they usually wound up tragically miscarrying, so there’s that.

A wry smile twisted her face. “Is that how you greet an old friend?” she teased.

“I’d only dare to ask it of an old friend,” I replied. “I can see that you have had many good things eventuate (with at least one more in the offing); may I assume that your other half is in fact Perry?”

“Of course I am.” Perethegrast, Heir Apparent to Alamanast, King of the Realm, Second of that Name, shuffled out from the knot of other people who had entered in Merry’s wake. While Merry was blooming with good health, Perry was looking decidedly green.

“I have some medicine called ‘Dramamine’ that could help with that,” I offered. “I just gave some to the kids; they’re still sleeping last night off. But I have plenty left.”

Perry smiled slightly and waved my offer off. “It will pass, and I will endure until it does.” It was obvious that even motion sickness couldn’t dampen Perry’s usual optimism for long.

I clapped my hands together briskly. “So. Down to business. Melegrethan was not very forthcoming about what exactly is going on here, or at least not to me; I would be most grateful, therefore, if you would be so kind as to enlighten me on exactly where we are and where we’re bound.”

This seemed reasonable enough to my friends, and so they proceeded to relate the particulars of the mission they were on, its origins, its goals, and its present state. There was much back-and-forth between the lovebirds and many parts where one or the other backtracked or corrected themselves, but I’ll elide all that and just lay it out here like I always do.

The Realm was, of course, entirely land-locked, but the river going through it went inevitably to the sea. As the river was navigable in its entirety, this meant that the Realm had access to the sea in that way. Recently, a colony had sprung up at the river’s mouth, called Rivermouth, as the people of the Realm were not the most inventive when it came to nomenclature.

At any rate, one day, a stranger with a weird accent had sailed into the harbor and requested an audience with Alamanast Himself. His name was Diego Portola Balboa, or so he claimed, and he wanted to show the Realm the wonders to be found beyond the Great Sea. All he needed, he told Alamanast, was a ship of a certain design and a crew to sail the ship.

Alamanast had considered the prospect long and hard before coming to a decision. The mission was a go, and Perry and Merry would go along, as both had been enthusiastic supporters of the idea since Balboa first pitched it. Balboa was less than pleased, but Perry and Merry had partially assuaged him by the energy and vigor they’d put into the project.

It’s all very well to say, “Do it,” but the getting ready to do it always takes quite some time if the doing is of such moment as this was. Time and money were lavishly spent on the ship, which Balboa called the _Sweetheart_ , before ship and crew were ready to get under way. Their mission was to cross the Great Sea and plant an outpost, embassy or colony on the far side as appropriate.

They were one day out from the archipelago known as the Final Isles when the storm hit, and it had tested the ship mightily. They had been caught up in the storm for over a week, but had finally come through without loss of life or limb, and had managed to retrieve the three of us into the bargain.

Not everyone was happy to see us: the Captain disliked latecomers; moreover, he liked children even less. He was a good man, though, and completely committed to seeing the mission through. He was almost stereotypically Spanish in his pride, joie de vivre and colorfulness; he chafed at the thought that Perry and Merry were along to keep watch or ride herd on him. He was a magnificent captain, though.

So there I was, aboard an experimental ship on a mission to seek out the ends of the earth, watching over two preteens with their own tasks to perform of which I was woefully ignorant and under the gimlet eye of the captain and the hero-worshipping and expectant eyes of my friends. No pressure there, huh?

Still, it seemed we were off to a good enough start. What the next few days would bring was another matter completely…

TO BE CONTINUED


	3. III: The Tower at the End of the World

The lone stone tower, its battlements long since abandoned, perched precariously on the rock outcropping that just broke the surface of the waters at high tide, when once its four-story height had dominated a swathe of rolling meadowlands; grey stones piled upon grey stones, now all that remained of the mightiest civilization the world had ever seen, and the continent that had given it life and eventually, death. How I knew all of this, I still don’t know, but as soon as I saw the tower, the knowledge was in my head, as though from an old history text I’d had to read in school but forgotten until now.

Those who knew of its existence, this lone spot out here three days’ full sail beyond the Final Isles, called it Warden Point, or some variation thereon, the last vain outpost of the land in its eternal war against the sea for dominion over the surface. Yet they never dared to enter the tower itself, imagining it an unholy place, accursed alike by land and by sea. Again, I knew better. While the ancient stock of provender the empire had set within it had long since turned to dust, the tower itself could easily provide adequate shelter to a waylaid ship’s company and crew for as long as their own victuals held out.

From the moment the lookout had spotted the lonely speck off in the distance, everyone aboard had known we were going to investigate it. Thus was our remit: we were to explore every nook and cranny we came across, whether exciting or mundane. None of us was expecting this place to be one of the mundane spots, though, and it wasn’t.

Prudent man that he was, the captain anchored a safe distance from the rocks and detailed a boarding party into a longboat. That party included Perry, my charges and myself, but not Merry. She would come ashore in the second boat, assuming no disasters.

The door barring the main entrance to the tower was very nearly ossified through by time and the environment, and the lack of proper clearance made forcing it open even harder, but eventually, we got enough of our guys on it that it opened, revealing… the inner door. This was not terribly unexpected. At least there was room enough between the doors to bring in a proper battering ram, so the inner door yielded more quickly.

Once inside, we split into groups of three and began exploring. The ground level was more or less completely stripped of anything beyond its stone walls, as were the two floors above it. The really interesting parts of the tower would prove to be at its height and far beneath it.

The door to the roof would need forcing, but the door to the cellars did not, so we went below first. These cellars were mostly mundane storerooms, but in the very center space, there was what had once been a secret door that had been left ajar. Inside were stairs that descended into darkness. I counted twenty-six switchbacks as we climbed down to their base, where we found a metal hatch, also still open.

The level accessed by the hatch at the bottom of the stairs looked like it was designed to survive a direct nuclear strike on the tower; metal reinforced the stone in key ways that suggested that possibility. Portions of this large, extensive and compartmentalized level also looked like they had been used for an indeterminate period of time, but abandoned long ago.

Some rooms, we had to force our way into using blowtorches to cut through the doors. One such room, we named “the Hall of the Kings”, as it was a gallery of life-sized statues of the ancient royalty of the long-forgotten nation that had built the tower. It was a quiet and solemn room, tinged with melancholy when you saw the empty spots that would never be filled.

Before each statue in the Hall of the Kings, there was a stand bearing a plaque that named the King and summarized his reign. All the figures were male; apparently, this nation had forbidden that there ever be a Ruling Queen, and I wondered about the tensions and conflicts which that policy, tradition or law must have caused.

We named the next room “the Suicide Hall” because around twenty people had used it for that. They’d plugged the vents, lit a huge charcoal brazier, and gone to sleep. The process had partially preserved their remains; we could tell these were all older people, at least. Twenty people had outlived their world—but not by choice, and so not by much. Old and tired and without hope, they had sought an end of their own choosing.

Most of the rooms we found were not nearly as mournful; in one, there were still several intact scribbles and pictures drawn on the walls in places that suggested that they were the works of children bivouacked here long ago. They left precious little other evidence to mark their passage, though.

Eventually, we ran out of rooms to chart down below, so we made our way back up to see what could be found atop the roof. Merry had joined us by this time, giving our spirits a necessary boost.

The roof access door soon yielded to our efforts, and the five of us, Merry, Perry, Cookie, Joey and I, all quick-stepped to get into the open air and the light. The other held back or had already gone back to the boats, so the five of us had the roof to ourselves.

The view all around was magnificent, except at the far end of the roof. There grew a familiar clump of greenery, a miniature hedge with its branches twisted to form an archway. Having seen its twin in the Sky-Realm of the Giants, I knew that were the archway open and were I to go through it, I would be in the Chamber of the Tree once more.

A pedestal bearing a plaque stood in the exact center of the roof, not unlike those marking the statues in the Hall of the Kings far below. The plaque read:

EXODUS POINT  
From here did Magnatharast lead the remnants of his people  
To new lands, new lives and new hope  
Let this stand ever to warn the proud of  
The consequences of their folly  
Pride destroyed those who built this tower  
Pride destroys the proud even today

And thus was explained all the signs we’d seen. A series of images flashed through my mind: people fleeing to the tower as the earth crumbled around them; a group of relieved survivors filling the rooms below; the few elders growing despondent at the end of their world; and a young and charismatic man using a family relic to take his people away from the inevitable death that lingering here would bring. The revelation quite took my breath away for a moment.

“So, we have returned to our roots,” Perry said, breaking the silence that had fallen over us as we contemplated it all. “What say you, Merry? Should we make this place a bastion and a shrine, or should we leave it desolate as we found it?”

“The question is one of great weight and moment,” Merry replied. “I should want to turn it over in my mind for many a day before coming to a decision on it. Yet, it is not entirely up to us, as yon portal is shut, and might never open again, will we or nil we. Perhaps we should consider that our answer, at least for now.”

No sooner had she spoken than there was a rustle that presaged the branches pulling back so that the way back to the Realm was clear.

“It would seem we are answered indeed,” Perry said with his usual cheer.

A deputation was sent through to arrange the re-establishment of the Tower as an outpost of the Realm, but our mission was nowhere near its end, so after their return, the _Sweetheart_ weighed anchor and we were off…

TO BE CONTINUED


	4. IV: Here Be Dragons

After passing many shallows that marked the drowning of the ancient continent, we came at last to a series of coral-based archipelagos and the reefs associated with them. The fish were plentiful and quite tasty, and the islands bore fresh water and an array of flora and fauna that stimulated the eye as well as the palate.

There were no humans, centaurs, giants, or any other form of intelligence to be found, though, which was a surprise, given the propensity for humans (at least) to do just what we were doing: exploration with a view towards settlement and colonization. Soon enough, we would find out why.

Further on, we came across an island of volcanic origin. Even though the volcano had gone dormant long since, the island’s emergence from the shallows long post-dated the destruction of the continent that still stretched below the waves. Still, there was food and water to be had there, though again there were no people.

As the island was quite extensive, we spent several days ashore, after the captain circumnavigated its shores, and various shore parties probed the island’s every nook and cranny.

It was on the morning of the fifth day that we finally found the reason the islands all around were so thoroughly unpeopled. I was leading the kids on an excursion to some caves another party had found the day before, so we were happily climbing the ancient volcanic cone when the heat of the sun was blocked by a huge shadow.

There was only one thing of which I knew that could cast a shadow like that. I looked for it, and there it was, circling not far above us: a dragon. Its flight pattern suggested that it was coming after us, and only its own carelessness had betrayed its presence prematurely so that we might flee.

Fortunately, the mouth of the caves was close at hand, so I hustled the kids inside and made my stand at the entrance. Every member of the crew that went ashore carried a whistle for emergency use; they had already proved their worth a few times. I blew on mine as loud as I could make it, but I knew that help might not arrive before the dragon was upon me. Still, the only way it would get at the kids was over my dead body. Such is the Way of the Protectors of the Realm.

I was never in doubt as to the danger I faced. This was not some misunderstood creature needing only some guidance to lead a proper life; this was not something merely lashing out from pain and loneliness; this was a vicious, cunning predator that enjoyed what it did thoroughly.

It was a predator, and Man seemed to be its preferred prey. This would tend to explain the rarity of dragons in the lands around the Realm; mankind tends to seek out and utterly destroy those beasts that prey upon us, and we are very good at it.

The dragon alighted a few scant yards from where I stood. I must have looked rather unthreatening, a scrawny and short teen standing there unarmed. I was not afraid, though, and that must have shown. It decided that it should try its ranged attack before coming after me with tooth and claw, so a gout of brilliant fire streamed from its mouth at me.

Instinctively, I raised my hands as if I were holding a weapon in front of me—and the Sword was with me again, slicing the fiery stream so that it split to either side of me. I didn’t even feel warm, convection or no. I found that I was smiling in relief. I knew now that I would overcome my foe.

The flames stopped, and the dragon looked at me in perplexity. Instead of the charred mass it had expected, confronting it was a living human armed with a glowing Sword. It blinked a few times before flopping over on one side in an ungainly heap of scales. “…Help me?”

Wonderful. It talked. It talked like crocodiles shed tears, so I’d best not lower my guard. That it was faking its sudden incapacity was so laughably obvious that I wondered why it was even bothering.

Almost before I could move, another dragon leapt over the huddled form of the first, its wings spread and its claws ready to rend me limb from limb. This second dragon had been circling above as well, but had remained unseen due to its fellow showing itself and keeping our attention away from anything else. These dragons were clever, then.

There was really no time for thought; acting on instinct alone, I dropped, rolled, and stabbed upwards, slicing the charging worm from mouth to tail. It hadn’t even touched me on its pass.

With a tremendous crash, the dragon hit the side of the mountain, just above the cave, and fell to the shelf of rock directly behind me. This presented me with a dilemma: I had to make sure it was dead, so the kids would stay safe, but in order to do that, I would have to turn away from the first, uninjured dragon in front of me.

I slowly backed toward the downed dragon, trying to keep an eye on both at once, but then both of them shuddered. The one behind me was the greater danger to my charges, so I turned and charged it, hoping to out-race the fiery attack that I knew was coming.

I barely managed to hurdle the dragon before it came. Dragons are pretty well fire-proof, but only on the outside, so I started trying to get the erstwhile corpse shielding me to roll over. If I succeeded, the long slice I’d given it would face the flames, and thus the survivor would roast its fellow from the inside out.

Finally, the dead weight yielded to my exertions. Soon after, the flames stopped. There had been no reaction from the dragon corpse, so it really must have been dead by then.

Of course, the fact that the flames had stopped meant that the surviving dragon was trying to rush me, so I soon found myself fending off its wings, teeth, claws and tail. This was not as easy as that bald description might make it seem, as each of the listed weapons would have been hard to deal with on their own. Together, they spelled death for all but the most skilled fighters, or those bearing supernatural weapons that almost did the work for you.

Just as I finally managed to lop the dragon’s head off, an arrow struck its back. The whistle had done its work, so I was no longer alone. Had they been earlier, I would have preferred it, but I wasn’t complaining. “Look sharp for other dragons!” I called to them.

The aiding party numbered seven: Merry, Perry, the Captain and four good archers. The kids came out of the cave when they joined me, and we made for the boats, scanning the skies all the while. We left the dragon corpses behind, hoping any more dragons in the area would go after them instead of us, as dragons enjoy cannibalism.

When we reached the beach where the boats were, the Captain sent up a flare into the dying light. Yes, somehow the whole day had gone by during the course of my fight with the dragon. The flare was a prearranged recall signal: everyone still on the island had to be back at the beach in one hour or be left behind. No one doubted the Captain on that.

The Captain was a hard man, and a taskmaster, but he was fair, energetic and determined. He asked much of those under him, but still more of himself. It was this combination of qualities that got us out of more trouble later on…

TO BE CONTINUED


	5. V: The Boiling Seas

A day or so out from the island where I slew the dragons (Merry and Perry were all for naming it Dragon Island, but I preferred Volcania), we noticed something odd. We were all still jumpy and nervous from that last encounter, so anything even a little off was bound to catch our notice. The odd thing we noticed was that there was a sudden and very swift current pulling us onward, a current that accelerated as we went on. The heretofore plentiful fish vanished with the current, another sign that was not taken well by anyone aboard.

Not long after this, we started to hear the noise. It was barely audible at first, but grew ever louder as we went on, and the fact that as the current grew swifter and stronger the noise grew louder was not nearly lost on the crew, which again was still on edge over the appearance of the dragons. There were no birds about, either.

Wild speculations flew about the ship. It was a sea-serpent! It was a distant storm, strong enough to wreck us this time! It was the King of the Sea Himself, angry at our intrusion into His dominions! All these and many more like them were bruited about, almost as a game, but more and more anxiously as the hours went by.

Ironically, the kids were perhaps the least worried of us all, if only because they couldn’t really picture all the potential disasters that might overtake us. Still, their cheerful lack of worry helped some of the more nervous crew-members find their own courage in those trying hours.

When both current and noise slowly faded out, no one relaxed; if anything, everyone was even more on edge than before. The Captain kept us heading where the current had been taking us, but with orders to be ready to reverse course on the instant, and/or to drop anchor at need. These sensible orders did much to reassure the crew that their Captain was in command of the situation, which proved to be entirely true.

The current didn’t return for almost twelve hours, at which the Captain nodded and had the helmsman bring out a big book of tide tables to confirm his calculations. Tides were very different here than in our world, it seemed; whereas in our world, tides go in and out twice in a day, here they only went in and out once. As the tide rose, the current increased, until the full power of our engines could barely keep us stationary.

The noise had grown to a thundering roar now, and everyone aboard had recognized it for what it was: vast amounts of swiftly falling water. Up ahead was a raging waterfall that only poured over when the tide rose above a certain point. If we could only hold our own against the current until the tide fell enough to keep us from going over, we would be safe for the moment.

Quite a number of the crew thought we were near to falling off the literal edge of the world, but the Captain rebuked them as fools. Had they never seen how, when a ship left harbor, the rigging and sails disappeared from view last of all? Anyone could see what that meant: the world was curved, and the hull of the ship vanished because it dipped beneath this curve first! Whatever this nearby fall was, it certainly was not the world’s edge!

We made it, but just barely; the rocks at the waterfall’s edge were about to rip the bottom of the ship out when the current failed. The water rolled back, exposing a line of massive cliffs that stretched as far as could be seen in either direction. The Captain prudently had us make the ship fast against the line of rocks so that we would no longer be in danger of being swept down those nasty-looking cliffs. They might not be the world’s edge, but they’d still suffice to wreck us if we went over them.

Dozens or hundreds of feet below the massive and jagged cliffs was a misty sea that roiled and bubbled. We sent some stuff down there and when we brought it back, it was still steaming from the heat. Obviously, there was something below the seafloor that was heating the water to just below boiling, and the only reason it wasn’t affecting the whole ocean was that it was in what looked to be perhaps the largest meteor crater I’d ever heard of, and so well below the level of the ocean proper.

And what was to become of our mission now? The dilemma before us was even greater than the Morton’s Fork I’d faced in my fight against the dragons. There seemed to be no possible way for us to proceed on our grand voyage of discovery without almost certainly dying in the effort.

Going across the boiling liquid would be impossible, even if we could get the ship down there safely; going around the crater might take weeks, given how huge it was; so, to most of us our choices seemed restricted to going back, but the Captain disagreed. He had apparently heard legends about this place, and prepared the ship’s design according to his own notions of what might succeed. He therefore had all hands go to work on a most peculiar project.

It took several nerve-racking cycles of the tides, but we eventually finished rigging up the hugest gasbag I’d ever seen and began to slowly fill it with some of the hot air that rose from the crater. I knew a bit about the history of aeronautics, and so I was doubly surprised by this solution to our difficulties, as the Realm had always seemed to me to be languishing in a quasi-medieval state. Now, they were fielding a steam-powered ship that could deploy an aerostat? Goodness.

My surprise deepened when the gasbag filled sufficiently to begin lifting not a small capsule as I had envisioned but the whole ship. The ship shuddered and strained as the ballon gained more and more lift. After a few more jolts, the Captain (somewhat belatedly in my view) had the hawsers holding us to the cliffs cut, and finally we were aloft.

I could scarcely credit it. What was this ship made of that it was light enough to serve as the basket for a hot air balloon, wicker? It might be amusing for the reader to gaze at these passages and read of my disbelief, when but a few days before I had been in combat with dragons, but I find I am more willing to accept a dragon than a flying ship with such a relatively small gasbag holding it up.

We were just high enough that the vapors streaming up at us were unpleasant but bearable; you may be certain that many of the crew found that they suddenly needed less possessions than they had brought, and tossed the unwanted stuff over the side in an effort to lift us enough that we could escape the heat. The trouble was that the heat dissipated too slowly for us to get atop it, and so we sweltered.

The wind that took us across the crater was as languid as the current had been swift, but I think I’ve made clear why we couldn’t rise enough to catch a better breeze. Slow as it was, this tepid breeze still sufficed to bring us past mile after mile of sizzling seas as each hour passed, though our stock of provisions was dwindling at a somewhat alarming rate.

It was when we next sighted land that the troubles really began…

TO BE CONTINUED


	6. VI: Gold Fever

The island was the first and only one we found in our flight over the boiling sea that filled the ancient meteor crater (a crater and sea of a size that I later calculated was on the order of the whole North American Great Lakes complex). It was fairly small; really, just a spur of mineral that rose above the waters. This spur was obviously the central peak of the crater we were flying over, but the most astonishing thing about it was that it appeared to be composed entirely of gold—more gold than existed in the rest of the world combined.

As soon as I realized what the island was, I was on the lookout for the inevitable problems that would come (as soon as I stopped fantasizing about buying up one of the Hawaiian Islands by reminding myself of the stupid conservatorship—I am, sadly enough, only human). These problems began almost immediately with little grumblings among the crew as the island drew nearer.

We dropped anchor above the island and sent down a barrel of water for an hour before drawing it back up; this had become our standard test to see whether the temperature beneath us was livable or not. The barrel came back warm but bearable, at least in the short term. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who wished it had come back boiling hot, as the grumbling only increased when the men realized they might have a chance at all that gold so teasingly close beneath them.

After only a few more hours, the festering discontent grew bad enough that the Captain called all hands together and made a general address. He started off by recapitulating the origin of our mission, moved on to reminding everyone of the trials they’d already been through, and then addressed the current situation.

“Any man that wishes to remain, can,” the captain said solemnly. “But we will leave only enough provisions with them for two days. Remember, there are no fish in that sea, and there is no way to sail across it. Nor is there any soil on the island, so there are no plants or animals to be eaten. But still, let anyone who wants possession of the island have it for the short time he will live to enjoy it.”

This insertion of sense stopped most of the grumbling for the next few days as we floated away from the island, but I could see that several of the crew were busily turning the problems over in their heads, trying to work out how they could get even the smallest bit of all that gold for themselves. The fact that we were still in sight of the island only increased their cogitations.

Rations had already been short, owing to the abbreviation of our stay on Volcania, but as the days passed with no replenishment in sight, they were progressively cut even more. Soon, the rumbling of our stomachs might just drown out the grumbling of the malcontents.

Finally, we reached the opposite edge of the crater, which was actually much larger than the one we’d first passed across. The rim formed a substantial strip of land which the local coral had enthusiastically added on to where it could. There were streams of fresh water, large masses of vegetation, and not a few birds that flew out to look us over as we approached.

The obvious thought that flew into most everyone’s minds was that here was the perfect base camp for the exploitation of the island of gold. If the Captain made the same offer now, perhaps half the crew would abandon ship in a mad effort to claim their dreams of avarice, and wind up cooperating for a bit, but then killing each other as they yielded ever more to the urgings of their greed.

I haven’t mentioned the individual crewmen much, because we didn’t interact so much, as I was mostly occupied with Perry, Merry, Joey and Cookie. From what I’d gathered when we did interact, mostly they didn’t like talking to landsmen, though they made an exception for the kids whenever they were about. Even though I was of an age to be starting out as one of them, they still held me as too much a landsman already for them to take to their hearts. Merry was a girl, and so beneath their contempt, and Perry was the Heir, so they counted him as too much an officer type for the fo’c’s’le hands to be rubbing shoulders with.

So much for the crew, though I will call them by name when appropriate. The officers were another story, though there were only a few of them. The Captain I have already sketched in outline, but I haven’t mentioned the First Mate, the Captain’s best friend and just as driven a man as the Captain. They came from the same little coastal town in Spain, with a long and most complex name that I never heard correctly. The final officer aboard was the ship’s doctor, a ruddy man far too fond of his “medicinal” libations for my liking. His corpsman was the one to trust in the medical sphere. And so much for the company.

All this time, I had been trying to get Joey and Cookie to open up to me about their prior adventures in the Realm, but they had been rather less than forthcoming; nor were they willing to talk about the particulars of their current mission with me or anyone else. Joey was actually apologetic about it, as we had had a nodding acquaintance in the camp, but after he told me that he’d promised that he wouldn’t tell, I understood, and desisted bothering the kids.

Of course, by then the other troubles were coming to a head, and I had to figure out how I’d keep the kids and Merry and Perry safe through what was coming. Basically, I tried to make our quarters as secure against assault as I could with the materials at hand; since those materials were scant enough before we’d started tossing stuff overboard to gain relief from the heat rising from below us, I was rather up the creek there.

Still, when the actual mutiny came, we made out a bit better than I’d expected, by which I mean we weren’t all slaughtered in the first five minutes. What happened instead was that the mutineers tried to take the Captain and the Mate prisoner while most of the crew were out exploring what we were calling “Rim Island”. They thought that this would allow them to present the loyalists among the crew with a fait accompli, winning by default. They had, naturally, underestimated just how stubborn (and paranoid) the Captain and the Mate were.

Since the mutineers had essentially bypassed us, we were able to hole up in our quarters for the duration, though Perry tried to insist a few times that we should aid the loyalists. I asked if he really wanted me to have to explain to his father that I had let the Heir get himself killed instead of protecting him as I should, which silenced him long enough for me to agree to a slow expansion of the area under our control, as long as we could keep it secure.

The ship was built as a series of watertight compartments with limited access-ways between them; this aided immeasurably in keeping our section secure and in biting off more for the loyalists. The Captain and the Mate were holding their own as the balance of the crew began to return, and choose their sides, which worked against the mutineers. Eventually, they had all been subdued, with as few killed as possible.

Now we faced the problem of how to deal with men we could no longer trust…

TO BE CONTINUED


	7. VII: The Voyage Continues

And so we began the final part of the journey of discovery that had begun in such high hopes. Those hopes seemed sadly distant now, but a tiny trace lingered in all our minds that they might yet come to fruition as we made our way onward. Even the mutineers felt it, though they seemingly neither had nor desired a role to play in making those hopes come to pass.

We were steaming across the ocean again, having set down beyond Rim Island and cut the ballon apart in the wake of the mutiny. The question of how we would retrace our journey was left unanswered for now; what had been decisively settled, though, was that there would be no flying back to the gold, even were the mutineers to try again successfully.

The question of our provender had been thoroughly solved by the abundance the shore parties had found awaiting them on Rim Island, so we were back to full rations. Yes, even the mutineers, though the Captain would have had every excuse to keep them on starvation feed. I must admit, I didn’t understand his generosity of spirit until much later, as there was a part of me that craved vengeance on those who had endangered us all in the name of unalloyed cupidity.

A week crawled by, and then another, before next we sighted land, but when land finally came into view, it proved to be exactly what we had been searching for all this time: a new continent. We searched up and down the virgin coastline for another two full weeks, avidly seeking out any signs of present or past habitation and finding none—until that very last day of days.

The kids and I had gone ashore again on a deep probe in search of anything that might indicate whether people had ever been in this land at all, but the morning had passed without success, and we were about to head back when Joey saw the thin white plume of smoke rising quite close by. I couldn’t think how we had missed it before, even in these woods, unless it had begun after we passed this way earlier.

The country was very much like the barrier islands off the US east coast, muggy and hot and brimming with flies on the hunt. I hoped none of the bugs carried anything dangerous, but there was nothing I could do in any case, so I shrugged and kept slapping fruitlessly at the little fiends.

There were deciduous hardwood trees all around, reducing our visibility to a matter of yards, but I was pretty good at marking our trail well enough that we could retrace our path at need, so when we broke off to find the source of the smoke, I was sure we would be fine.

Occasionally, we had gone up the trees to try to see how far the woods ranged, and spotted the mountains in the distance, but no break in the woods was to be seen. This again was very much like the US east coast, enough that I felt that quiver of something that people usually verbalize as, “Someone just walked over my grave”.

The smoke was coming from a weird woven hut of oddly familiar design. There was only one visible door, in front of which stood a man dressed in white. I knew the man immediately, though we’d never met in the flesh: he was Carinste-Nonthe, the First Protector of the Realm. As soon as he saw me, he nodded gravely and held up his hand in a “Come no closer” gesture. I stood there, bewildered by this turn of events, until a voice rose beside me.

Joey, usually the more silent of the kids, was the one who had chosen to speak up now. “You must wait back at the turning of the path, Young Protector, and guide the others who are to come onto the right path towards this place.” His speech was firm and determined, and his face reflected that certainty.

Cookie added, “This is where our paths must diverge, Young Protector, but do not worry; we are, have been and shall remain in the hands of the One. Your warding of us is over, and you have done it well. Now, all that remains is for you to guide the others, that the seed which we are to plant here may flourish.”

Heavy-hearted but knowing they spoke the truth, I walked back the way we had come. I had barely reached the forking of our path when the mutineers came, walking in single file, like men entranced. I sent them down the right path as they came, until they all had passed by me.

In my mind’s eye, I could see plainly what was taking place. The mutineers were being shown the consequences of their rebellion: exile to form this new colony of the Realm. But this exile was not without hope: Joey still had the apple I had picked from the Tree, and when he planted it in the central square of the new town, it would sprout into an archway like those others that led back to the Chamber of the Tree.

This mode of communication with the Realm would only be open to the King’s Men at first, but gradually, the exiles would be allowed to use it, after however many years they needed to purge themselves of the treacherous impulses born of their gold fever. So the exiles would return, in due course, or most of them. Those who were too unbending in their avarice would find themselves compelled by that avarice to wander forth from the settlement in search of a way to assuage their insatiable greed, restless loners breaking trail for others to follow in exploring the new lands.

Of course, by then the colony would be a rich and prosperous new fief in the Realm, blossoming under the Warding symbolized by the Archway, as the inscription on the plaque as I had last seen it had foretold what now seemed to me like a lifetime ago. Other fiefs of the Realm would spring up in this new land, each with its own Archway, and by the time of Alamanast the Twelfth, they would number in the dozens.

So this was the so-secret mission on which the kids had been sent: the planting of what was not a penal colony, where all the unwanted of a land would be dumped and left to rot or to flourish as they would, but a redemption colony, where those who needed to make amends could be sent and from which they could return once that debt was paid in full. Such was the promise of this new colony; I hoped it would not be cast aside by those who came after, as my studies of history hinted was inevitable.

The Captain would know of the mutineers’ fate by now, and the _Sweetheart_ would have already heaved anchor and started on her way back across the ocean. I regretted that I did not take the opportunity to give Merry and Perry a proper farewell, but I knew they already understood, and that I would yet see them again, in that nebulous future.

And what of Joey and Cookie? The First Protector would see them home, and their paths might or might not cross mine again here in the Realm, but this mission of ours was ended. That we had seen each other face-to-face, even at a distance, gave me hope that my own restoration was closer than I had yet thought.

All this unveiling occurred as the gray mists swirled around me on my way out from that world and back to ours…

TO BE CONTINUED


	8. VIII: My Return

Of all the things I was expecting when I landed back in this world, an ambush ranked about as low on the list as you could get. Had this happened in the Realm, I would have been almost completely certain of victory; after all, as the Young Protector, I wielded the power of the Sword at need, and none could overcome that. Here in this world, however, I was just an ordinary kid, with only my native fighting skills and whatever Melegrethan had managed to drill into me to aid me.

In my prior skirmishes with the minions of the state, my foes had suffered under the twin handicaps of not initially wanting to hurt me and underestimating my abilities, and I had not hesitated to take advantage of these fleeting handicaps. The foes I faced now wanted to kill me, and they had been informed of how capable I was, so neither of my usual advantages was present. This would be my toughest fight yet.

Time seemed to slow as I dodged the first set of attacks. My heart was hammering fit to burst, and yet I was oddly calm. There were perhaps a dozen of them, but they were mostly occupied with attacking Melegrethan about twenty or thirty feet away from me. Since they would naturally be watching out for attacks from him, I might be able to catch them off guard, if I could break my way over there past my own attackers.

Breaking past the attackers was, of course, far easier to conceive than to accomplish, but I managed it. Of course, this put them behind me while I was going after their fellows, but as soon as I got the heat off Melegrethan, he returned the favor. The two of us stood in the classic back-to-back pose of two surrounded fighters, mostly because taking that pose makes tactical sense when you’re surrounded; the crowd of attackers pressed closer regardless.

At a nod from their leader, the thugs drew knives. This just got so much worse. Knives can let someone take out their target even if they themselves get taken out, and that’s in a case where their target also has a knife. A knife fighter up against an unarmed opponent is almost certain to make his kill, even one-on-one, assuming he knows what he’s doing. As I said earlier, there were perhaps a dozen of them, all wielding knives now.

A really bright spotlight broke the gloom that covered us. “And just what exactly do you clowns think you’re doing?” The question was accompanied by the sound of a service revolver cocking. The cops were here.

Now, a service revolver holds six bullets in its cylinder, and there were rather more than six of the thugs, so they might have been able to take the cop out, but only if they were willing to sacrifice six of their number in the process. This is where such thugs will always fail: while they’re perfectly willing to see their fellows fall if they will win, none of them is willing to be the one who falls. So it was with our attackers. Instead of charging the cop, they scattered like the insects they were.

As they left, though, I got a good look at their leader in the spotlight. You probably won’t be surprised to read that it was Mister Price from the camp; I wasn’t particularly shocked, either. I was, however, uncertain in any number of ways: uncertain as to what the attack meant, if anything; uncertain as to what we should do about Mister Price and his involvement; uncertain what effect this would have on future missions, if any; and uncertain as to whether I could give a coherent and concise report of the course of the mission I had just completed, given the current disarray of my thoughts.

The sheriff took us back to the local bus depot, from which we would go back to the camp. I hoped Melegrethan wasn’t expecting to debrief me while we were on the road with all the avid ears about, and he wasn’t. He did have me write all this down, though, so that it wouldn’t fade too terribly from my memory.

In the event, Melegrethan reassured me that my account was coherent enough to be perfectly comprehensible to him. The problem of Mister Price was not an immediate one; apparently, he wouldn’t move while we were in the camp unless he was certain that he would appear to be justified, which was why we needed to avoid him if at all possible. He and his hench-thugs had only attacked now because of our isolation; had he anticipated the cops intervening, he wouldn’t have made the attempt.

It all made sense, but the passivity of it chafed. My recent missions had seen me taking an active role in effecting the desired outcome, even if that role was simply as a bodyguard. To let a back-stabbing, bushwhacking villain such as Mister Price remain free and active was anathema to me. Nevertheless, I would yield to Melegrethan’s greater wisdom and much greater knowledge of what was in the offing.

This account has, of course, been quite abridged from the totality of what happened. For example, I haven’t previously related the Captain’s chief flaw and how it demonstrated itself in his actions. The Captain was a model man in many ways, but his near-stereotypical Spanish-ness extended to the traditional racism they demonstrated during their sway over the Americas. As I mentioned, he didn’t like children, but since they and I were white, he routinely invited us to dine with him, which I declined as politely as I could.

This disdain even extended to Merry and Perry, who were the attractive shade of golden brown that characterizes the descendants of Magnatharast that formed the upper strata of the Realm. Royals though they were, they were never invited to the Captain’s Table.

Oddly enough though, the Captain was a fair man to all his sailors, who, being men of the Realm, were all also various shades of brown. He would make the occasional remark lamenting that a Spaniard crew would do better and so forth (especially after the mutiny), but that was all. Even so, I told the kids that if they took any of that racist bunk seriously, I’d hang them upside down by their ankles until the blood got back into their brains.

None of that made it into my debriefing, either, as it wasn’t really relevant. Had it led to the mutiny, I would have mentioned it. Had it affected anything else substantively, I would have mentioned it. All it did was show up the Captain’s one major area of foolishness, so, while it sometimes made things a bit awkward or uncomfortable, I still thought it wasn’t worth mentioning; like the sometimes miserable food or foul water, it was something to be endured without complaint—until it actually hurt someone.

Mister Price was another matter entirely. He had shown that he was most willing and able to directly harm those he had an animus toward if he could do so without fear of retribution or loss of reputation. What his specific problem with us was, I still didn’t know, but Melegrethan did; I hoped he would entrust me with that truth sometime soon.

Our return to camp was uneventful, and even though I was on guard any time I saw Mister Price in my vicinity, he never made a move. The long game was on, and only time would tell who would come out the winner.

THUS ENDS

The Ship/Shape/Span of the World, by a Spick

Being the Eleventh Tale of the Coin, the Sword and the Medallion

THE STORY CONTINUES WITH

The Undesired Princess & (You Guessed It!) the Enchanted Bunny

Being the Twelfth Tale of the Coin, the Sword and the Medallion


End file.
